Introduction: Rumination leads students to show negative and depressive moods of long duration and of great magnitude, affecting anxiety that are stimulated by an over-activation of the nervous system as a receptor for the spontaneous problems that precede it. Methods: For the present study, a non-experimental design was used with a population of 850 university students of both sexes. Likewise, the instruments used were subjected to content validity with experts from the study area and the reliability was Cronbach’s Alpha, with a value of .852 for the rumination variable, interpreted as high reliability and with adequate internal consistency. Results: The hypothesis test analysis was ordinal logistic regression. The results indicated that rumination affects the anxiety of university students, because the proposed model explains 93.5% of the dependent variable student anxiety and reflective thinking, with Wald = 796.558 and p = 0.000 <0, 05; better predicts anxiety in college students.